As populations age, societies must take into account the nuanced needs of different groups. This is the research domain of Cynthia Chen, who joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as visiting scholar with the Asia Health Policy Program during the 2022 winter and spring quarters. An Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Chen’s current research focuses on the well-being of older adults, healthcare financing, and the economics of aging. 

Drawing on support from Singapore’s Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, the U.S. National Institutes of Aging, and the Thai Health Promotion Foundation among others, Chen explores how demographic, economic and social changes affect the burden of care, financing needs, and optimal resource allocation in the future. 

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In a recent talk at APARC, Chen presented findings on gender and socioeconomic differences in aging, exploring the ways in which such society-level characteristics can have major positive and negative effects on the health and well-being of older persons. 

According to Chen, these effects are interconnected with factors including access to effective health care, support systems that enhance function and restrict dependency, and programs assuring financial security and opportunities for older persons to effectively engage in society. “We must move beyond the archaic old-age dependency ratios and metrics, such as GDP, which neglect many of the critical factors that influence societal function,” Chen argued.

Finding Better Metrics for Aging

Gender and socioeconomic differences affect a country's ability to support its older adult population. Specifically, the longevity risk associated with females' longer life expectancy entails different needs between genders in old age. Chen aims to quantify gender differences in the aging experience of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and compare differences in projections of disability and chronic diseases among future cohorts of older adults, including disparities by educational attainment.

In order to gain a more nuanced perspective on aging data, Chen drew data from The Aging Society Index, composed of established and available social and economic measures. The Index provides a quantitative estimate of the degree to which a society is successfully adapting to demographic transformation.

Much of Chen’s time is spent focusing on how to address gender-specific needs when developing policies and programs for aging societies. Chen cites The Network on an Aging Society, which defines a successfully aging society as “one which provides for the general well-being of older adults, is cohesive with minimal tension between generations and major subgroups, productive with opportunities for engagement both within and outside the workforce, and is equitable and secure.” Such society-level characteristics are necessary to understand the difference between successful and unsuccessful policies. 

Chen identifies systemic gender differences across critical domains of successful social aging that favor males. Thus, Chen argues, for many wealth or income-based measures, such as security, equity and productivity, males experience an advantage, which suggests room for improving women’s standing in paid work, job opportunities, and retirement income. One aspect where women do have an advantage is life expectancy. However, they tend to live longer in poorer health, reflected in a lower well-being score. 

Likewise, the gender disparity in cohesion is significantly driven by differences in co-residence rates, which is attributable to women outliving their spouses. These findings suggest that gender-specific needs should be considered when engineering policies and programs for aging societies. 

Varying Rates of Functional Disabilities 

Gender is not the only society-level characteristic that Chen investigates in her resarch on aging. In a recent study, published in Asian Development Review, Chen and her co-authors, including AHPP Director and FSI Senior Fellow Karen Eggleston, shed light on the dynamic evolution of the health and functional disparities of the future elderly.

In order to understand the differences in aging and its relationship with functional disabilities across multiple societies, Chen looked at data from Korea and Singapore. While the two nations have a similar pace of aging, they differ in the rate of increase in functional disability and chronic diseases. This may be due to many factors, including diet, lifestyle, and cultural differences, Chen suggests. Most notably, older adults with high educational attainment are projected to have a lower prevalence of functional disability and chronic diseases, and consistent across gender in both Korea and Singapore. 

The study employs a new model to compare projections of functional status and disability among future cohorts of older adults, including disparities in disability prevalence by educational attainment. These changes will have important implications for social protection systems, including the financing and delivery of long-term care and health care. The study highlights potential differences in the aging experience by gender and education in each country to inform social and healthcare policy and provides a common platform for international comparison to identify and compare challenges across countries.

Studying aging and effective medical care in late adulthood, especially with an eye for society-level characteristics, is an urgent task. Chen’s research complements the existing literature on life-protection activities, further underscoring the importance of investment in healthy aging and control of chronic disease so that the future elderly may receive appropriate care.

This commentary was first published in The Hill.

The future sustainability of the Earth cannot do without the coordinated actions of its two largest carbon polluters — the United States and China.

The most recent highlight in that realm is the U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s at the UN climate change conference COP26 in November 2021. The joint statement, which came during a turbulent time in U.S.-China relations, was both surprising and valued. The declaration reaffirms both nations’ commitment to “tackling [climate change] through their respective accelerated actions in the critical decade of the 2020s, as well as through cooperation in multilateral processes.”

The declaration also calls for “concrete actions in the 2020s to reduce emissions aimed at keeping the Paris Agreement-aligned temperature limit within reach,” including in the areas of methane reduction, decarbonization and forest protection. 

While the declaration represents a promising step forward and offers reassurances about new momentum for sustained future cooperation, it offers few details regarding concrete plans, nor the opportunities and challenges to enact and implement those plans.

Last fall, we at Stanford University partnered with Peking University to convene a series of discussions on a broad range of themes around U.S.-China collaboration on climate change, such as global sustainable finance, corporate climate pledges, as well as opportunities and challenges for the acceleration of decarbonization in both countries in general — both nationally and by sector — with particular emphasis on power, transportation and industry. The outcomes and insights were synthesized in a report on how to accelerate decarbonization in China and the United States, in which we highlight two urgent recommendations to facilitate constructive cooperation between both nations as they tackle growing environmental challenges.

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First, we need open-science research and development (R&D) collaboration.

Second, we need to be explicitly cognizant of political and institutional constraints.

This is necessary in order to translate promises into progress while protecting social benefits and their equitable distribution amid the green energy transition. As noted in both the joint declaration and our report, bilateral dialogues so far remain very high-level. We need future discussions and workshops at the sectoral and local levels to develop concrete plans. In enacting and implementing concrete plans, political and institutional constraints can pose real obstacles, as demonstrated by China’s past and ongoing efforts to control air pollution.

Hence, strong support from both national and local governments will be critical. As a first step, we need to gain a good understanding of who the relevant actors are in both policymaking and implementation and the incentives they face.

In this period of transition when there are still regional mismatches between energy supply and demand, it is too easy to let short-term needs push climate mitigation goals to the bottom of the barrel to address regional energy shortages. In both countries policymakers and those charged with implementation face multiple and sometimes conflicting goals. The prioritization of goals is shaped by incentive structures. Fostering incentive structures conducive to decarbonization is particularly important during the transitional period when consensus around goals and priorities is less clear. 

Furthermore, it is time to standardize standards. A recurring theme across our discussions is the need for shared, clearly specified regulatory frameworks and standards across both nations. Harmonizing standards will expedite trade, validation, accounting, climate pledges and environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) evaluation.

Only if there is standardization can organizations be required to follow unified disclosure practices for making available important information like the amount of carbon emitted. We need to make and implement more legislation to encourage a faster pace of decarbonization, and having unified terminology and standards is conducive to both effective carbon legislation and policy implementation. Common terminology and standards will provide a basis for carbon legislation. Having clearly stipulated standards and procedures can also make implementation easier and more straightforward. 

Last but not least, we are hopeful about the future of U.S.-China cooperation on climate change and believe that universities can play a significant role in the global energy transition. Universities are often the birthplaces of innovative technology, training grounds for talent from across the globe, as well as conveners of bilateral and multilateral dialogues. We hope the governments on both sides of the Pacific will work together to hammer out the needed details to build the momentum and make a real impact in the fight against global climate change. 

Shiran Victoria Shen is the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell national fellow at Stanford University’s  Hoover Institution, as well as an assistant professor of environmental politics at the University of Virginia. 

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas professor of Chinese politics, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, as well as the director of Stanford University’s China Program. She is also the Lee Shau Kee director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. 

Yi Cui is the director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, as well as professor of materials science and engineering. He is a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and professor, by courtesy, of Chemistry, Stanford University. 

Liang Min is managing director of the Bits & Watts Initiative of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. 

This commentary first appeared in Foreign Policy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a double disaster for President Vladimir Putin, as he faces a poorly performing military combined with an inability to shield his country from economic punishment. Both of these possibilities historically have also been sources of apprehension for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But China’s leadership turned its anxiety into action about 10 years ago, deliberately working to fix many of the problems and minimize the risks currently plaguing Russia in Ukraine.

One result is that the Chinese military is more likely to perform well even though it has not fought a war since 1979, when it lost thousands of troops in a punitive but brief invasion of Vietnam. Adding to that, China’s economy is both far larger and deliberately more diversified than Russia’s. A sanctions effort like the one presently aimed at Russia would be much harder to sustain against China. These two observations do not mean deterrence won’t hold, only that the unfolding events in Ukraine will likely do little to make Beijing more cautious.

Nearly everyone overestimated Russia’s military capabilities—including probably Putin himself. During its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s air-ground coordination has been ineffective, and Russian forces have shown risk-adverse tendencies in the air. Russia has also struggled with logistics and keeping its military supplied. Notably, it appears that Russia acted on bad intelligence and therefore did not believe initial strikes that maxed out its firepower were necessary. Furthermore, many Russian weapons platforms are outdated (for example, its Cold War-era tanks), and modern Su-57 fighter jets and T-14 Armata tanks only exist in comparatively small numbers.

The Chinese military used to clearly exhibit the same deficiencies. But over the past decade, it has embraced significant reforms, creating a much more capable fighting force that should give even the United States pause.

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First, while Russia allowed its conventional capabilities to atrophy, Chinese military spending has exploded over the past three decades, increasing by 740 percent (in comparison to Russia’s 69 percent) from 1992 to 2017. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China spent almost four times on its military in 2020 than Russia ($244.9 billion to $66.8 billion). In 1999, less than 2 percent of its fighter jets were fourth-generation, 4 percent of its attack submarines were modern, and none of its surface ships were. Twenty years later, not only did China have much more of everything, but the majority was the most advanced, modern versions available—with China exhibiting advantages over Russia, even in combat aircraft, a traditional area of weakness for China.

Indeed, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commentators often refer to China’s economic might as one of the reasons their military would outperform Russia’s—Russia has been “stingy” with its military modernization and production of precision-guided munitions primarily because of a lack of resources. By contrast, China has more than 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles, making the PLA Rocket Force the world’s largest ground-based missile force. Estimates place the number of missiles positioned against Taiwan alone at around 1,000.

Russia’s poor performance does remind us that it takes more than just a lot of fancy systems to win a war (though having more advanced systems and more of them surely would have helped). The human element of Russia’s failures is front and center. Putin probably did not have an open and honest communication channel with the military, which was fearful of providing unfavorable information to the erratic leader. Russian troops were largely considered incompetent, but Putin thought superior technology could overcome human deficiencies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping identified similar training and competency issues in the PLA 10 years ago. But under his command, the PLA has been proactively implementing significant reforms to avoid similar pitfalls. And unlike Putin, who apparently believed technology could overcome deficiencies in personnel, Xi came to the opposite conclusion. When he came to power, he took one look at the military and recognized that with all its fancy equipment, the PLA probably could not fight and win wars and perform the missions it had been assigned. Of particular importance, according to China’s national military strategy, was to fight local wars under informationalized conditions. This meant that the network between platforms and people—the ease of connectivity—was the main feature of modern warfare. China needed the best equipment; an advanced command, control, computers, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) network; and tons of precision-guided munitions. But perhaps most importantly, it needed troops that could leverage these systems to conduct seamless operations across services and top-down through the chain of command.

What followed was a series of slogans—the two incompatibles, two inabilities, two big gaps, the five incapables—all designed to point out the organizational and personnel issues of the military and focus leadership attention and resources on fixing the issue. A massive military reorganization followed with moves such as reorganizing effective combat units to be smaller so that they can mobilize more quickly and can remain self-sufficient for long periods of time. This means, in contrast with the Russian military, the PLA will likely have less reliance on generals at the front lines. China also established theater commands to facilitate joint operations and prioritized realism in its military exercises to help it prepare for real combat. Part of all of this was Xi’s demand that the military communicate its failures and weaknesses so that they could be addressed. Moreover, to improve command and control, China has moved toward engaging in multidomain joint operations all while standing up a new joint operations center that will ensure that, unlike with the Russian military, orders will be communicated and understood at the lowest levels. Indeed, the main reason that Xi has not yet made a play for Taiwan is likely his desire to hone this command and control structure and practice joint operations in realistic conditions for a few more years—a cautious and pragmatic approach that the situation in Ukraine only encourages further.

The PLA itself acknowledges that it still has some distance to go with training, particularly with regard to joint operations, but it looks as if the hard work is paying off. The complexity and scale of China’s national military exercises are eye-opening. It takes a great deal of planning, synchronization, and coordination to take service-level operations to the joint level. China appears to have made great strides in this area. The United States has observed, for example, China executing deep-attack air operations in its exercises that have combined intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) with multi-domain strike; lift for rapid mobility and advanced fighter manuevers. Russia has relied heavily on artillery and tanks, now and historically, while the PLA is showing a more balanced approach to combined arms operations.

For all these reasons, we should not expect the Chinese military to perform as poorly in its first real military operation since 1979. The PLA is structurally superior to the Russian military. And the Chinese know it. Granted, it’s hard to know whether some of the outlandish claims in the Chinese media are true—that the PLA Air Force would actually “be able to take out the Ukrainian air force in one hour.” But one thing is for certain—the Chinese military is learning lessons from Ukraine, whether it is to stockpile more precision-guided munitions, ensure solid command and control, or cut off internet access to prevent the leaking of information to the West, which will only serve to improve its warfighting capability in the future.

Why would authoritarian regimes lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions designed to respond to citizen appeals? There are many reasons, according to APARC Predoctoral Fellow Tongtong Zhang, who argues that providing responses through such channels can incentivize citizens to conform to the regime and appease potential dissidents, while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests.

Zhang is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled “Whose Voice Matters? Loyalists, Dissidents, and Responsiveness in China,” which examines this very question by looking at deliberative institutions as well as other political communications channels in China. After completing her predoctoral residency at APARC this summer and earning her PhD, she will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, she will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication.

In the following Q&A, Zhang discusses her research and fellowship experience at Stanford. The interview was slightly edited for length and clarity.

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Your research centers on how authoritarian regimes (particularly the Chinese government) perpetuate their rule over societal actors and how preferences and behaviors of these societal actors are shaped as a result. How did you come to develop an interest in this topic?

I think it’s a combination of my life experience in China and the literature I read in the seminars on comparative politics in my first year of PhD. Those readings introduced me to differences in the logic of governance between democratic and authoritarian governments. In democracies, the behavior of officials is mainly shaped by the incentive to win elections. In non-democracies, the governance behavior of officials is largely shaped by the desire to secure citizen compliance and, by extension, to maintain social stability. Existing literature on how autocracies obtain citizen conformity has largely focused on two strategies — co-optation and repression. However, while growing up in China, I observed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has more tools at its disposal to control the public. 

Among these tools, I am particularly interested in the fast-growing channels for public deliberation under authoritarian rule because, without free popular elections, authoritarian rulers should have little incentive to invest in these institutions designed for citizens to express grievances and make appeals to the government. So I am curious about what role these quasi-democratic, participatory institutions play in authoritarian control and how societal actors (e.g. citizens, firms) feel about and react to the regime thanks to these institutions.  

You are working on your first book project; can you tell us a bit about what to expect from it? 

The book is based on my dissertation and asks why dictators lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions that are designed to respond to citizen appeals. An overarching question is whether the government actually responds. If it does, do all citizen appeals receive equal consideration? Previous research on authoritarian responsiveness largely contends that autocrats prioritize the appeals of potential dissidents. However, my research leads me to argue that autocrats may respond to all appeals but with qualitatively different types of responses.

More specifically, I hypothesize that for autocrats, providing substantive responses — responses that resolve the appealed problems — to regime loyalists can incentivize more citizens to conform to the regime. On the other hand, providing symbolic responses — responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems — to potential participants of collective action can appease these potential dissidents while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests. Taken together, I theorize that authoritarian officials would selectively provide substantive responses to citizens who show higher compliance with the regime’s control and that officials would selectively provide symbolic responses to citizen appeals that are more likely to elicit collective action. I support this argument using primary government documents, interviews with local officials, and original, large-scale datasets of online appeals and government responses in China.

You have mentioned your interest in political communication in non-democracies. What are some aspects of political communication that you find especially interesting? 

My research primarily focuses on deliberation and responsiveness in non-democracies. I am curious as to why dictators invest in deliberative institutions designed to answer citizen grievances, under what circumstances these institutions would help citizens resolve their problems, and perhaps more importantly, how these deliberative institutions shape citizen attitude towards the regime and their political behaviors.

Beyond deliberation and responsiveness, I’m also interested in other communication strategies (e.g. education, media) that authoritarian regimes use to secure citizen compliance. For example, I’m currently working on a paper studying the political behavior of teachers at Confucius Institutes (CI), the Chinese government’s overseas program for cultural and language promotion. The prevailing view in media and policy writings is that the Chinese regime prescribes specific actions that CI teachers must take (e.g. censorship) when encountering politically sensitive questions. However,  using interviews, a global survey, and experimental methods among CI teachers in over 70 countries, we find that the Chinese regime only prescribes broad goals to CI teachers, such as “defending China’s national interests,” without specifying how to pursue these goals behaviorally. We also find that under these ambiguous instructions, men and women CI teachers choose divergent behaviors to advance the regime's goals.​​

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges to development in non-democracies? 

Development is a huge topic. I’m only able to provide some observations based on my research about authoritarian responsiveness. In this area, the biggest challenge I observe is still the lack of institutional channels for citizens to hold the government accountable. It is a sign of development that authoritarian governments are investing increasingly in deliberation channels, online and offline, for citizens to express grievances and demand public service. While less than 10% of appeals in my sample receive a substantive response from the government, it also shows that some citizens do get their problems resolved through these participation channels. 

Yet, when authoritarian officials fail to provide substantive responses, citizens have no legal, formal channels to punish officials. In democracies, unsatisfied petitioners can vote for the opposing party in the next election, expose government unresponsiveness to media outlets, and even sue the government in court. However, in autocracies, these methods of punishment are weak or absent. Some citizens may use non-institutional methods to punish the government, such as protesting or exposing official misconduct on social media. But these behaviors, which aim to attract a lot of public attention, are often cracked down on if they achieve this goal. Without credible punishment from the bottom-up, authoritarian officials treat these deliberative institutions as a tool for their social control rather than a channel to serve the public.

My research also finds that the Chinese central government does conduct regular audits on government responsiveness at the local level. But this top-down monitoring is largely symbolic and focuses on the quantity rather than the quality of officials’ responses to citizens. Therefore, I think that to improve government responsiveness in non-democracies, it is still crucial that the customers of these deliberation channels, that is, citizens, have some formal, legal channels to punish officials when officials fail to resolve the appealed problems. 

Your robust research methodology includes qualitative interviews, archival research, computational methods with large-scale datasets, and survey and field experiments. How did you develop this approach?

My PhD department (Political Science) provides us with many training opportunities for both quantitative and qualitative methods since our first year in the program. Our course sequences in quantitative methods and formal theory introduced me to a variety of powerful analysis tools and causal inference designs. I’ve also received quantitative training from the departments of Statistics, Communication, and Computer Science. In particular, the methods courses taught by Prof. Jennifer Pan and Prof. Dan Jurafsky helped me lay a good foundation for skills in web-scraping and natural language processing. 

My qualitative training started from the Chinese politics course sequence taught by Prof. Jean Oi. Later on, I continuously learned from Prof. Oi every time I talked with her about doing fieldwork in China. She guided me to extract and focus on the “big question” from lots of seemingly unstructured details I collected in the field, and she also gave me many helpful suggestions on what homework I should do before going to the field, how to approach people in the field, and how to design my questions and learn to improvise during the interviews. 

This combination of quantitative and qualitative training has made me a strong believer in mixed-methods research. I think that quantitative methods are powerful in showing systematic patterns and qualitative methods are powerful in uncovering the mechanism underlying these patterns. Moreover, qualitative fieldwork has helped me a lot in understanding how things actually get done at the micro level (e.g. the step-by-step workflow of a specific bureau within a municipal government when handling a citizen appeal), which I think is useful for identifying important research questions and developing hypotheses before collecting data systematically. 

Beyond your book project, what are you working on while at APARC? How has your time here aided your research?

I very much appreciate APARC’s support in the 2021-22 academic year. I was applying for postdoctoral fellowships in the past fall, and the Center’s generous funding and supportive staff have greatly helped me concentrate on market preparation. I also enjoyed the office space provided by APARC. Due to the pandemic, we were not in the office all the time but while I was there, I had very interesting conversations with several other fellows at the Center. Chatting with them broadened my horizon about the Asia-Pacific region. They also offered me some fresh perspectives on my research, which I find helpful while revising my dissertation. 

Thanks to these valuable resources provided by APARC, I was able to make progress on my dissertation and several related projects. In one paper, I show that citizen petitioners can increase government responsiveness by using certain rhetoric to communicate with local officials in China. I find that compared to appeals using a “legal script”, which invokes citizens’ legal rights to obtain public service, appeals using a script of “performance legitimacy,” which invokes the CCP’s moral commitment to deliver socio-economic welfare to the public, have a significantly higher likelihood to obtain substantive responses from local governments. Another paper I’m working on investigates how the characteristics of petitioners, appeals, and government responses change over time in China by comparing the appeals under Hu Jintao’s rule vs. appeals under Xi Jinping’s rule.

Has the global pandemic affected your ability to travel and do research? How have you adapted?

I was planning to conduct field interviews in the Sichuan province of China in 2020 and had to cancel because of the pandemic. However, on the positive side, the travel restrictions provided me with a relatively long period of time to concentrate on the quantitative parts of my dissertation and enabled me to make substantial progress on some time-consuming work such as scraping Weibo and reading and coding the posts. 

What is on the horizon for you? What's next? 

I plan to graduate this summer and will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, I will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication. I will also go onto the tenure-track academic market and hopefully get a faculty position in a university.